Tag Archives: invention

A few months ago I decided that once I was through all my T1 copies I’d try something new in my manufacturing. Turns out I first should have checked my copies before stating this.

With the new way industry works these days copies don’t get destroyed when you try to invent them into their T2 equivalent.

Which means that if you have copies with 300 runs, you can actually try to invent from them 300 times.

I did not know this since I don’t pay much attention when doing my clicking of the day, but I noticed this a few days ago when I tried to figure out why my amount of T1 copies wasn’t going down.

As it stands now I have about 200 copies with all around the 300 runs still on them. So maybe I should just put them somewhere for the time being and just start something new. Seeing as it will still take me months before I get through my current stock.

This new way of working is good though. It used to annoy me to no end that I had to keep making copies of my BPO’s just to do my invention, turns out that right now I could just work with 30 copies for a few months instead of needing my stock of hundreds.

I’ll keep that in mind for next time.

As for the rest, I’m currently on the lookout for something to do with my combat alt(s), I’m doing a few missions when I log in and browsing the corporation forums, trying to figure out if there’s anything out there I could join. Because as most of you know, EvE is more fun when you play it in a group.

My manufacturing is going pretty well. So well in fact that while I stock up for a few weeks, I usually only last a week at most. This due to the fact that I can actually update my jobs at work, which means that my lines are currently spewing out T2 products two times a day.

This is positive for my wallet too. Especially when things like last weekend happen and one of the modules I tend to sell a lot suddenly went up in price and I was able to sell a few hundred of them for a million more than I usually sell them.

The station trading I was experimenting with however, has slown down once more. I made about 100million trading datacores but I tend to use a lot of them for my invention runs too, so I decided to stop trading them for a profit and just brought all the ones I had left to my home system so I can use them when the time comes and I ran out of the T2 BPC’s I have now.

I’m just glad that public courier contracts are a thing. Without these I would have given up on my manufacturing and invention ages ago. All I need to do is buy all the products I need in jita, then set up a contract for little under a million per jump et voila.. A few hours later I usually have the products where I need them to be on my manufacturing station, ready to be put in the corporation’s containers.

I still need to learn to just buy enough to last me a month or so. I still need to learn that that wallet is not doing anything with all the ISK in it. I should use it for things instead of just letting it sit there.

It’s the same as with putting your real money in a bank, it’s just sitting there, interest is almost non-existant, you might as well use it to buy stuff.

Or at least not on your alts that you’re training. As most know by now, tomorrow is the Phoebe release, and it’s bringing something in the game that nobody really saw coming. Or at least I didn’t.

The 24 hour queue will disappear, you will no longer have to check up on your queue to check whether or not it’s still running or if you forgot. Starting tomorrow, you can put your whole skill plan from EvEmon in there.

Which is a good thing, or at least it is if, like me, you have a few characters just skilling up for certain parts but you’re not doing anything else with them. With this new feature I won’t have to remember to check up on them, I’ll have hundreds of days on training already put up on them. Yay!

The one thing that might be bad about all this is the fact that not only people with alts will have no reason to log in. I myself have been there before, logging in just to update my skill queue, but when doing that I did start to talk to people and do things with them from time to time. If you don’t need to log in anymore because you have years of training ready, you won’t have any reason to start talking anymore and you might just not log on anymore.

But I guess CCP saw more positive points on all this than the negative ones.

I have to admit that other than that I don’t know much more about the Phoebe release, I saw the invention changes but turns out they decided to wait with those for the next one. We’ll see.

As for what I’m doing in game right now, it’s pretty boring. I sold my POS parts, I moved to another system on one of my characters, I’m putting lots and lots of blueprints in my invention slots and I’m about to start FW on another character.

Pretty curious to see how that will turn out. It’s about time I tried it, who knows, I might just like it.

I finally did it. After talking about it for weeks and thinking it all through, I finally took down my PoS.

When I first bought the POS from a friend it was mainly because of the way industry worked back then. In high sec there were almost no lines that were useable as an inventor/manufacturer other than those in backwater places too far from the market hubs.

At the time I had no idea what a POS was except for a way to do the things I wanted to learn how to do.

Jump forward to the update that changed that. Suddenly you could use stations again, the whole industry bit changed, I no longer had to click hundreds of times in order to update my factory lines, and stations were a viable way to work once more. Having a POS still gave you slightly more options in the manufacturing/invention speed. But still, was upholding said POS and fueling it worth the slight speed upgrade?

In my case, it wasn’t, or at least not anymore. Due to RL taking a lot of my time and EvE slightly being on the background I couldn’t continue the way I was. Spending 500m a month on fuel while I only used my lines once per day or less. I didn’t make as much as I used to due to my lack of time and I was basically barely making break even, all of this due to the cost of fuel.

So I did the logical step, I took the POS offline and brought in all the modules, figuring that I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. If in the future I decide to set up a POS again it won’t be where I’m currently at anyhow. I would just move.

Taking down the POS took a lot longer than setting it up. Which was annoying, not only do you have to unanchor every single structure one at a time, you have to go scoop them to your cargo hold. And as you all know, you need to be rather close in order to start scooping.

This was done with a lot of warping out and in at the bookmarks I made for the modules. Seeing that when you’re flying an industrial to tear down your POS, speed is not part of your vocabulary.

After I was done (or so I thought) I took the tower offline, which was one of my many mistakes, seeing that I still had two batteries hanging around the tower, and in order to unanchor them the tower needed to be online. It took me over an hour to have it come back online, unanchor the batteries and then take down the whole tower again. Shooting it all down would have been faster, a lot faster. But that’s hindsight for you.

So now I’m towerless and using the station to do my thing. I have no idea what the future will bring for my industrialist, but I know it won’t entail fueling that tower each month. Yay!

As an industrialist you have to check every part of the equation; is the material not too expensive, am I losing ISK on the time spent manufacturing, would it be more cost effective to just buy the invented BPC’s from someone and so on.

I.. Don’t really do that. This is partly due to laziness and partly because I just enjoy doing what I do, not really caring if I make a profit out of it.

Which is one of the many things in my EvE time that I should work on, but as my readers (yes you two there) might already know, planning isn’t really my strong suit.

A good example of this is the fact that the past week I haven’t done any manufacturing at all. I was missing one tiny part for my production but I didn’t feel like going out to Jita to get it, despite the fact that I have an alt parked there and I could have easily put up a courier contract to bring it to me.

My time vs efficiency isn’t quite as it should be. At least I was still doing my invention, right?

I have a few thousand BPC’s still waiting on their time to come, their moment to shine, to become an X or a V.. After that, or maybe even before that, I will be retiring my POS, something I decided on a few weeks ago but am finally coming to terms with. I’m not using it to its full power and therefor there’s no reason for me to keep using it.

Retiring my POS might even mean that my industrialist goes on his way to Null sec. The WH corp I joined on my combat alt has an industrialist branch who have a null sec HQ that I was offered to join. I might just take them up for that.

But that’s something for in a few months from now, because as we know. Planning and I, it doesn’t really work.

Last week, a friend I made in EvE told me that I should join the corporation he had joined. He’s been talking about it for a few weeks now ever since he moved into Wormhole space and he said that I should try it too. Seeing that it might give me an opportunity to come out with my combat character some more.

Fast forward to Monday and I am accepted into the corporation, all I had to do was get myself a few ships and move to the wormhole.

“Who needs a scout, I can handle this!”

Something that I did yesterday, I bought myself a few frigates, a destroyer and a battleship and spent about an hour and a half moving one ship after the other into the wormhole. It gave me something to do, it even had me thinking about fits. Although I have to admit that it didn’t help me in thinking too hard about them since once I figured I was settled I noticed I had forgotten dampeners and ammo (woops)

“I’m a pretty fly, with a nasty sting”

Joining a wormhole corporation is something that I talked about in the past, I even thought I had joined one before but turned out that they were actually high sec mission runners like myself who happened to have a POS in a hole that they went to from time to time. Which is cool, but not what I wanted. What I wanted was to live inside one, and not just alongside one.

Hopefully my move will allow me to experience this side of the game from close-by instead of just reading about it. It’s scary, because I can’t scan to save my life, but I guess that just means I’ll have to learn.

“Let’s get this show on the road!”

Other than the wormhole move and figuring out what’s next on my list in the new corporation, I will be using this weekend to run a few tests on my industrialist. I’ll be updating my way out of date spreadsheet, to check if I still make a profit (because who counts this stuff psh!) and whether or not it’s more profitable for me to stay in my POS, or if I should just tear it down and start working from a station.

If the prices aren’t too high for my manufacturing and invention I might just tear down my POS and just use the headquarters. Seeing that having a POS means spending 500m a month in fuel. So if the cost of working from station isn’t too high, I can just start doing that.

While creating T2 items I noticed a slight decrease in the market movement of some of the modules I make. Meaning that I’ve been scratching a few of the list in the past couple of days. I still have a few thousands blueprints that I’ll have to invent (holy crap why did I make so much copies of everything) but once those are all done, I’ll be checking which I liked creating the most and, of course, where most of my profits came from.

I am a manufacturer, a producer of goods, goods that people need in order to do whatever it is they do.

Not just any kind of goods either, I manufacture T2 items. A special branch of items that you in order to create them you need to spend time inventing them first.

But what happens when you produce so many of them, that you have a stock so large that it is almost impossible to get rid of them quickly? What if you try and do this anyhow, knowing that it will flood the market.

That’s right, you crash it, and your sale price will go down quite a bit. I currently have too large a stock of the items I produce to put them for sale. This is bad, seeing as right now all of those items are currently sitting in a hangar, being trickled onto the market bit by bit.

And when things are just sitting there, they’re not making ISK, and when you’re not making ISK, you can’t put it back into your production cycle. Which means that right now, I’m producing nothing, other than a whole bunch of T2 BPC’s of the items I currently have an overstock of.

As you probably figured out, that’s not the way it should be going.

I have been creating these T2 items ever since I first started manufacturing, because I started doing this together with a friend who told me what to do when he still played. He has long since stopped playing EvE while I continued his little business.

The production of these things has made me a bit of ISK, enough to have a pile lying around, just looking at me, and screaming ‘Use me! You need to!’ but I don’t really like seeing that number go down, which, as a manufacturer is a stupid thing. Spend money to make money and all of that.

Maybe I should try something new, something that would need me to invest more ISK but get a bigger margin of it.

Right now I invest 500k-1m to get a profit of 1m-3m.. That’s nice, especially seeing I make a few hundred of those items per day.

Crius was released a few days ago, and I’m loving it. The industry revamp, especially how they upgraded working with a POS is just great.

I’m sure there are people out there that might complain about the fact that their precious BPO’s now need to be inside of the POS. But I, as an inventor and T2 manufacturer, can’t be happier.

I can start my invention runs with a click of a button from my home base instead of having to go to my POS and be within 2500m of the lab. Not only that, but I can do it even when I’m 15 jumps away.

Next to this, it’s just one click to turn on one invention run. For those who worked invention or manufacturing jobs, they know that this was a pain in the ass.

In the past you needed to decide which line you would put the job on, after which you pressed a button, using said line. Once you clicked, you had to click again to grab the blueprint, click ok once more another ok, and only then you could start the job.

That’s 5 clicks for one job. You can imagine how much of a pain it was if you had about 20 or 30 invention lines running, each day.

Luckily, that’s now in the past, I can start one job with two clicks, one to decide the blueprint, one to start. It’s a lot faster than before, and I can all do it from station, so easier at that. I will happily take the cost of the installation for that.

“You mean, I need less materials? Sweet!”

The fact that I can even install jobs remotely from a dozen or more jumps away, means that I can use my trading alt too. Of whom I found out that he has the necessary skills to do my invention and manufacturing runs too. Guess it’s a good thing I checked my skills on him.

The only thing that was missing was the ability to install them remotely so I did the most obvious thing to do… I bought a PLEX from the market (through a sell order, shame on me!) and activated second character training.

My trader now has a month of training activated for him, which I will use to train him a bit further into retail and allow him to activate remote jobs.

I’m still figuring out the bonuses that my POS can have, and what it does (as far as I’m aware they’ll just reduce the installation cost) but for now, I’m really happy what Crius has offered me as an industrialist.

Crius will be deployed today, the only reason I know this is because I noticed the Facebook update post from EvE Online stating that everyone should make sure that their queue is nice and long. You know, just in case.

“Changes are coming”

What does this update mean for people? For some, nothing at all, seeing as there are people out there who don’t really care, or read up on anything and they just play the game, figuring it out as they go.

Others on the other hand will have their way of working in the game changed completely. Just think about how blueprints now have to be inside of the installations instead of safely in station while you’re copying them, or doing anything else related to them.

I have to admit that I myself don’t really know too much about the coming update myself. This due to the fact that the past few weeks I’ve been busy slowly melting due to heat and the last thing in my mind was sitting in front of my computer reading up on things and testing on the test realm.

I do know however, that my POS production will change completely. In the past weeks, the one thing I did when logging in was copying a lot of BPO’s again. Mostly things that I used to invent in the past but haven’t in over half a year.

I figured that with the coming update, it’d be nice to try and go back to my normal way of manufacturing, so right now I’m sitting on about 400 T2 bpcs waiting to be put in production. (See, I did do something productive!)

I can’t wait to try out the new way POS’ work. I’m also rather curious on whether or not we’ll see more of them popping up. I’ve seen people speculate on the fact that there will be a lot more in high sec because there will be no restrictions to put them up (aka standings).

Good thing that I have about 4 months of fuel stocked up just in case the prices will suddenly rise.

In addition to all of this, depending on how that in station invention/manufacturing will turn out, I might just decide to take down my POS. But that’s something that I will have to look into soon(ish). It all depends on what the numbers will say.

As for none industry related news;

I’m still looking for a Low Sec corporation to join. I haven’t been looking that hard but I’ve got my eyes open. If you know someone, or are someone, who wouldn’t mind having me around spinning my ships and joining whatever it is low sec corps do. Feel free to give me a shout.

I had hoped to cash in on Prospects, to make a bunch and have a nice amount of profit. Unfortunately, this hope was linked to the fact that people would keep the price high for at least a few days.

Back when the venture was released, I made a lot of money in that first week, creating these new mining ships for noobs. I thought I could do this again. But this time, I was ready.

I spent a few hours on the test realm writing down what would be needed for a Prospect. After the file was created I went on my way to Jita and started setting up buy order for the raw material. I already had all the BPO’s that were needed to create a few of these ships so I could save a bit more money on these.

When all was ready I waited for the patch to drop, over 200 venture BPC’s, ready to be invented. The invention of one such BPC takes 12 hours. The fact that I, like many other people, have a job, meant that I could only start an invention run at around 7, when I got home from work. Meaning that some people already had a head start.

12 hours pass and it’s 7 o’clock, I should have already gone to work but I decided that I’ll just work from home (allowed to do this once a week).

This was a good decision. Because as it turned out. I made a mistake. No surprise there.

Instead of having an Advanced Ship Assembly Array, I had a normal one. Which meant that once more, despite me thinking I was prepared and wouldn’t have to go to Jita. I had to do just that.

I bought a few and brought them to my POS. Forward about half a day and I have my first Prospect ready and 10 more in the tubes. These would take a few days to complete, but I went to Jita with high hopes.

The first 3 I ever made, were sold for a nice profit of around 100m before they went down, and down, and down.

I was looking at the market and saw them going to around 25-30m and sticking there. With a heavy heart I have to admit once more, that planning is not my strong suite and that I definitely am not made for long term options.

I’ll still make a profit on what I have, but it won’t be near the profit I had hoped.

Such is the life of an industrialist. You can plan all you want, but your competition will be doing the exact same thing and they’ll make sure that your profit won’t be as high as it should have been.